About the Beta Program

[mu88]

Hi

I have two questions regarding passkeys on Android:

1. Does the Bitwarden Android app make use of any proprietary Google Play Services APIs? Or does it use its own implementation and is therefore an option for ROMs like LineageOS or /e/OS which use MicroG?
2. Will the passkey support be back ported so that Android 13 can be supported as well?

Thx for sharing some insights

[mu88]

@RyanL @bw-admin friendly ping

[RyanL]

Hey there. My understanding is that it will use Google Play Services APIs and is only available in Android 14 and above, which opened support for 3rd-party passkeys. If you have additional feedback please add it here - the development team is monitoring!

[mu88]

Thx @RyanL for your reply, really appreciate it

I’m closely following the growing passkey support of Bitwarden because at the moment, my phone stack does not support this. As I’m very keen to not feeding the big data monopolys like Google, I’m looking for alternatives.

At the moment, I’m using the Android OS called /e/OS (based on LineageOS) which focuses on data privacy. While many basic Android features are part of the open sources Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Google decided some years ago to move some key features into their proprietary Google Play Services (GPS) - things like push notifications, etc.
To bridge this gap, many people use MicroG which is an open source implementation of GPS - so does /e/OS.
When it comes to new features being added to GPS, they have to be reimplemented in microG - of course always a piece of work that a small group of enthusiasts accomplishes in contrast to a big army of Google developers.

When it comes to passkeys, Google went down the same road: many key features of passkeys are implemented in the GPS and are therefore not available to users like me.

So during my search for an alternative implementation of passkeys that does not rely on GPS, I stumbled over Bitwarden and was hoping that you guys will come up with a solution that does not rely on proprietary APIs like GPS and therefore would be a viable alternative.

That’s basically my background, I hope I could shed some light on it?!

[shelvacu]

Is there a way to install the android beta if I don’t have google play store?

[BJReplay]

Hard fail on the new native Android app beta

It won’t log in unless you allow it to phone home to beacons5.gvt3.com.

I use Adguard DNS which blocks this, and on log in, the query log shows this domain being blocked.

If I turn off Adguard, I can log in.

[Axel]

Is the iOS testflight version for the native app out?

I can only find the ‘old beta version’ for passkeys available on Testflight.

Edit: It appeard after first leaving and then joining the beta again.

[foxt]

The new mobile app is finally here

…just in time for me to have moved off Bitwarden ^[1]

Personally, even if I was still a fulltime Bitwarden user, I wouldn’t be too excited for the new mobile app update. I do not mean that with any word of disparagement, I assume most of this was trying to get a MVP out without having to continue developing a, shudders, Xamarin app (god I really with MS made that work).

The new app is definitely snappier than the old one (search is still a bit slow), but basic functionality seems to be broken, like TOTP, auto-fill and Face ID unlocking (I am on beta iOS so take that with a grain of salt).

The UI, still has an air of, “this was designed people who are specialists in cryptography not design”, which might be what you want from a password manager, but I will still give my:

complete I am an amateur and am no way a professional UI/X designer critique:

Okay, lets look at the old app, the new app, and for comparison, 1Password, which usually gets referred to as the password managers for want good looking apps, which is handy because that’s the one I’m using now-a-days.

Bitwarden (old)	Bitwarden (new)	1Password

You’ll see that when it comes to pure information density, the old BW app is a clear winner, and the 1P app is the clear loser, but, it’s not always that straight cut.

My personal problems with the new design are:

• Hierarchy: In the old app, there’s a very clear hierarchy, the ‘View item’ header is the biggest & boldest text on the screen, followed by ‘Item information’ (with its accent color and heavy font weight), then by the individual input labels. With the new app, it’s not so clear cut. The ‘Item information’ heading uses a lighter font weight than the input labels.
• Grouping: The 1Password app uses grouping to great effect. It groups all the most important information (the username, password, OTP & passkey) into a visually distinct, eye-catching, box, while giving everything else a transparent background, lowering their contrast. The new Bitwarden app creates visual groupings for everything, with only one element in them, essentially diminishing the entire point
• Disambiguation: Similar controls should look the same, and differing controls should look different. Simple right? Well, in the new app, everything looks the same. Links look like textboxes, labels look like dropdowns. In fact the only thing that looks different is the language selector (which is in the Appearance settings) for some bizarre reason. The “Edit Item” page looks almost identical to the “View Item” page, the only difference being the fields available.
  
  
  . Take a look at the ‘passkey’ field on 1Password, it has a nice purple gradient and the label is dimmed, because it’s not something you can edit - it’s just a label.
  At least the ‘Passkey’ text isn’t randomly bigger than everything else on the page.

In my opinion, the new design is a downgrade in usability (it’s harder to visually scan), but I’d love to see improvements (even if I’m not there to use them)

---

1. specifically, to 1Password, which, in general, I do prefer to BW, but when it comes to UI, BW has the basics in place, but lacks polish, 1P has extreme polish (like you can not only autofill to websites, but native desktop apps too), but has some questionable decisions, like, in the mobile app I can’t see a way to copy a password from the generate password screen, and weaker security for family & org accounts ↩︎

[Axel]

TOTP, autofill, and Face ID work, so it’s probably due to you being on iOS beta.

However, I’m on iOS stable and I’m having issues getting passkeys to work with this Testflight version.

And for the rest of your feedback – spot on!

It feels like they aimed to keep the same “theme” (understandably) while ‘modernizing’ it, inadvertently making everything less dense and less usable, instead of doing a proper rework (naturally subject to change).

[z3us22 (Rene K)]

I don’t know why but the login won’t work for me (Android beta).
I can type in my mail and the passphrase. The first login seems to work but it wants me to type in the passphrase again. It tells me that it is wrong although I can login with the passphrase on vault.bitwarden.com

[Paulspass]

I am experiencing the exact same behavior. I wanted to try it but tried multiple times and says username or password incorrect while I am really sure it is correct.
I hope this gets fixed as it is quite basic

[androidcn]

Not support Microsoft Authenticator loGin

[Hinton]

The release blog post, Bitwarden releases phased beta for native mobile apps | Bitwarden Blog covered this a bit. Passkeys are currently not available in the new apps but the team is hard at work implementing support and it will be available before the general availability of the new apps.

[Tukks (Giuseppe)]

Same problem here,
But when I logged on web, I had the warning : Low KDF iterations.
So I updated my KDF to 600 000, and now I can login on the bitwarden beta App.

Hopes this help

[z3us22 (Rene K)]

Thx - that fix worked for me!

[bahuma20 (Max Bachhuber)]

I can not login to my selfhosted Vaultwarden instance. Neither on Android nor iOS.

Logging in with my bitwarden.com account works though…

[Micah_Edelblut (Micah)]

Hi Max, this is a known issue that needs to be resolved on the vaultwarden side. Remember that vaultwarden is not affiliated with Bitwarden, it is not maintained by Bitwarden developers, and Bitwarden makes no guarantees as to the compatibility of our apps with vaultwarden servers.

[nickbelle9 (Nick Belle)]

Why do you have to choose between inline autofill and the default overlay when the previous app had both options working at the same time?

[dirksche]

Vaultwardens latest ‘testing’ tagged server versions actually work with Bitwarden beta. https://hub.docker.com/r/vaultwarden/server/tags
@Micah_Edelblut

[dirksche]

Yes. You can download from github.

Releases · bitwarden/android